Further Notes on Kitsch
The following note responds to a series of online comments that followed the initial publication of this essay. While these remarks were originally informal, their relevance to the broader argument justifies their inclusion here in edited form.
To state that «the symbolic imaginary underlying scientific notation differs radically from, and is irreconcilable with, anyaesthetic-emotional perspective» does not mean stripping it of its philosophical or aesthetic value – as scientists like Einstein and Feynman remind us. My point is that the symbolic manipulation involved in scientific notation is not grounded in aesthetic or emotional premises: it follows precise rules, dictated either by adherence to observed reality or by the internal consistency of a formal system that does not require further interpretation. There is no democratic or moral rule at play here, either.
In physics, one often hears that certain forms are «beautiful because they are simple», but this beauty is a consequence – not a goal. And their apparent simplicity often conceals deep layers of interpretative complexity.
Take mass-energy equivalence: the presence of the speed of light squared as a proportionality constant raises conceptual issues that aesthetic-emotional reasoning cannot resolve. One may well exclaim, «What a magnificent product of the human mind! Such a simple formula at the foundation of the universe!» But what follows is a reconfiguration of our entire understanding of the cosmos: space, time, and their unified metric are called into question. Simplicity vanishes – utterly. Incidentally, Minkowski’s metric was already known in mathematics before its applicability to Einsteinian spacetime was discovered – further evidence that symbolic structure does not necessarily carry content.
Popular science books often traffic in paradoxes that are not paradoxes at all – take the so-called twin paradox, for example. These texts reveal how the mediation between natural language and scientific notation is far from straightforward. Sometimes the gap is irreducible, as is the case with the terms wave and particle, whose meanings shift between classical and quantum frameworks. Addressing such matters formally is beyond most readers, and even for those capable of doing the math, the challenge of translating the meaning of equations into everyday language remains. Consider the notion of time, with its conventional division into past, present, and future – an idea swept away by Einstein, and one Joyce grappled with artistically in his work.
So when I emphasize the absence of content as no barrier to the existence of an artwork, I am reiterating the same point in different terms. I do not need to know what a mathematical object represents in order to manipulate it. Like it or not, A+A = 2A holds whether we’re counting apples on a tree or casualties in a war. So – are we mourning the slaughter or celebrating the harvest? This distinction, to me, is crucial when highlighting the metric-relational discourse at the core of an asemic page’s raison d’être.
In science, there is a constant interplay between theory and practice – between symbolic form and the content it describes. But the content of an experiment cannot be modified to fit the experimenter’s emotional expectations or aesthetic preferences. Reality resists such tuning.
Recent developments in artificial intelligence – despite frequent mischaracterisation as mere stochastic parrots – demonstrate how it is indeed possible to produce well-formed outputs without knowing what one is saying. That may sound absurd, but it echoes what we just said: one can manipulate abstractions and still arrive at valid results. Machines lack understanding, yet generate text and process information with impressive coherence. They are designed to simulate the workings of the human brain. This does not reduce humans to machines (or vice versa), but it does narrow the gap between them. As algorithms and hardware continue to grow in complexity, I believe we may reach a point where the two truly meet.
This morning, unaware of the comments under my piece, I was listening to Archie Shepp and marvelling at the coherence of the notes – even when they blurred into one another and defied semantic assignment. For this reason, all attempts to bridge music and asemic writing seem to me rich in unexplored potential.
My critique – perhaps a direct one – is not aimed at the use of kitsch itself – far from it! What I intended to clarify is that the association between scientific notation and kitsch is by no means automatic. On the contrary, it relies on an oversimplification that risks reducing both terms. Joyce’s letters and notes from his most productive years show how essential a deep grasp of scientific concepts is to meaningfully transpose them into artistic language.